Més Que un Hipster

Of all the Guardian’s football writers, Barney Ronay is my favorite. His writing is raffish and superbly intimate. His is the voice of an older brother come home from college to tell you glib and exaggerated tales of the secret lives of girls, why Coldplay is insufferable, and why your parents are all too bourgeois. Like a protagonist in a Nick Hornby novel, Ronay chooses his words carefully even when he makes a mess of things. I feel the same way about reading Christopher Hitchens, whose endlessly quotable and cutting prose is substantiated by trenchant observations about the crassness of some seemingly unassailable public figure. For Hitchens even Mother Teresa is fair game.

Ronay’s Mother Teresa is FC Barcelona. His first go at them—“Why are Barcelona so annoying?”—blends intentional attempts at humor (“it is easy to feel irritated by the manager Pep Guardiola, who is clearly bright and even nice but spoils this by looking like a swanky graphic designer, someone who might own a coffee table made out of barbed wire”) with genuine ire (“Above all I dislike their non contact tippy-tappy style of play, often deemed, like Barcelona themselves, to be intrinsically ‘good.’ I have a theory the popularity of this style owes a lot to the fact that it looks good on TV: a televisual style, suited to the armchair rhythms of possession-foul-replay-pundit-blather”).

For Ronay, Barcelona are corporate bullies whose actions are far more insidious than those of the amoral billionaires at Manchester City and Chelsea, because they wrap themselves in UNICEF and tell the world they are “more than a club.” It follows that even Barcelona’s public campaigns to entice players to the Nou Camp are framed as “more than a tap up.” Courted players are supposed to say it is their dream to play for Barcelona, while their clubs ought to shrug and say “thank you.” But surely, to paraphrase Ronay, a campaign to “free Cesc” isn’t equivalent to “free Mumia.”

Ronay’s crusade against Barcelona reappeared this weekend in an article about two forthcoming matches of wholly contrasting styles. First, the Arsenal-Barcelona Champions League clash, which Ronay notes will almost certainly be the “soft-shoe fixture of the season,” a veritable orgy of balletic shadow boxing that will lead to a veritable orgy of plaudits from football pundits enraptured by the “moral” superiority of possession football. And, second, Birmingham-Stoke, which is notable for both teams’ brutishly direct style, spearheaded by their two battering-ram center forwards Nikola Zigic and John Carew.

Why, Ronay asks with some frustration, must we accept that Arsenal-Barcelona is intrinsically “better?” Why should Britons in particular accept the moral blackmail presented by fixtures like Arsenal-Barcelona and shrink from reveling in the crash, bang, wallop of Birmingham-Stoke? On this point I empathize. Even though I harbor an emotional attachment to the current Barcelona squad, a little part of me dies when one of the club’s personnel castigates a stubborn opponent for “not playing football.” One may have a preference for pass and move, but to pretend that punt and run is a negation of the sport itself is not to state a fact but rather to invalidate diversity.

For Ronay, throwback matches like Birmingham-Stoke are a connection to a British tradition and ideology rooted in Charles Hughes’s vision of winning football, and in the glory of Nat Lofthouse’s heroics on muddy pitches. While I suspect Ronay’s professed love for muscular football replete with long balls hoofed to the sloped brows of “proper center forwards” is sincere, I can’t help but view his nostalgia as something akin to a mustachioed hipster’s insistence that he really does prefer Pabst Blue Ribbon to the latest, slickest microbrew. It smacks of desperate contrarianism, as if he is trying to out-Guardian the Guardian. Ronay comes close to tipping his hand when he attacks one-touch technical football by suggesting that its popularity is linked to the fact that it looks good on TV, that it’s been sanitized for the weekend “post-fan” nibbling tofu on his IKEA couch far away from the grizzled authenticity of the terrace. And in so doing, he may have gone too far.

The thing is, Ronay hasn’t consistently applauded muscle and hustle. His two smartest articles of the past year are tributes to Joe Cole and Jack Wilshere, perhaps England’s most naturally creative footballers. In Cole’s case, Ronay writes hopefully that his move to Liverpool would give him a chance to revive his career, and reminds fans why everyone fell in love with him when he was performing rather un-British technical feats in midfield for West Ham. In a telling paragraph, Ronay argues that British football itself is to be blamed for disciplining the fantasy out of Cole’s game.

In many ways Cole’s career has been a constant flight from the player he was as a 17-year-old, a battle to prove he is not what he once was. So much so that, at 28, it is hard to remember that he was meant to be a driving, expressive, utterly confident creative force. Here is a player who seems to have spent a decade forgetting himself, assiduously sanding away his own unique strengths.

Ronay’s article on Wilshere, deliciously called “Why we must savour the rare English delicacy that is Jack Wilshere,” is Ronay at his finest. He expresses whimsical admiration for Wilshere’s precocious talents and pre-emptive regret that these talents might be smothered precisely because Wilshere is English. Here Cole is treated as a cautionary tale—a player, like Glenn Hoddle before him, made to play as if embarrassed by his natural gifts by virtue of his Englishness. Ronay’s message is that we cannot let this happen to Wilshere.

Indeed, one reason England turns in mediocre performances in international tournaments is their lack of imagination when it comes to player development beyond nurturing speed and size. Ronay clearly understands this dilemma and is far more generous in these articles to the kind of player he dismisses as “Velcro-touch midfield gnomes” when he’s writing about Barcelona. But why is this the case? One might view this as more hipster posturing from Ronay, who simply finds players like Cole and Wilshere more palatable precisely because their talents are iconoclastic vis-à-vis their countrymen, while skillful Spanish midfielders are considered mass-produced commodities churned out by la Masia’s assembly line, and as such terribly uncool. Or perhaps when it comes to England Ronay is far more forward looking, suggesting he is in fact more than a hipster.

Sam Fayyaz is a PhD student at UMASS, Amherst where he studies political science when he’s not anoraking about soccer.

@Brian Phillips
Ronay distinguishes between better and better (in italics). The former meaning of superior quality, and the latter, as he explains, meaning morally superior, in a sense more true to some capital-I idea of football. And it’s the latter’s association with the way Barca/Arsenal play football that truly vexes him. I’m curious if you would make the case that Arsenal-Barcelona is better (in italics) than Birmingham-Stoke.

I think Ronay’s major gripe can still apply in his articles on Cole and Wilshire. The same way many in the soccer public laud Barcelona’s game as the true example of the sport and belittle the traditional English style, people in England tend to stifle any sense of free-flowing creativity whatsoever in an effort to mold everyone into a “proper centre-forward,” a “tough-tackling, running midfielder” or a “no-nonsense defender” playing the punt-and-run game.

He definitely waxes poetic far more lavishly when discussing Wilshire or Cole and cuts down the Barcelona passing style with vigor and aplomb but part of that is an attempt to stir up a reaction and drive up readership. The three articles are all aspects of the same argument: that stifling diversity is bad for the game.

As you note, so much of the backlash against Barcelona strikes me as backlash for backlash’s sake. “Everyone else goes nuts for this, but see, I know the real truth of the game. This Barça crap is overrated.” It’s nuts.

United often plays incredible one-touch passing, most memorably on the counter, that spins your eyeballs and nearly knocks the wind out of you, but among the many reasons people have for hating them, nowhere on the list will you find “TV-friendly style.” Many Arsenal fans who bemoan Barcelona’s self-righteousness go on in their next breath to trumpet Wenger’s idealistic approach to building a team, how he develops youth, refuses to overpay for transfers or wages, and on and on. As a Liverpool fan, I’ve seen and heard the jokes and jeers directed at the mention of “The Liverpool Way.” Of course Barcelona is smug about their approach. They also play in a way that can make you feel like the first time you ever saw a rocket leave earth.

Any club with an ethos, or whatever you want to call it, is going to generate resentment. The club with an ethos that also happens to be winning matches and trophies in a way that makes people talk about their place in history will bring out the worst of that emotion.

What would Florentino Pérez and Mourinho give to have Barney Ronay writing columns about Real Madrid being the most annoying club in the world, by far? Anything.

@Stoehrst Okay, but who’s actually stifling diversity? It’s not as though the Birmingham-Stoke approach is in short supply. The horde of brickbat-wielding diversity-stiflers, sometimes forcing everyone to play like Barcelona and sometimes forcing everyone not to play like Barcelona, strikes me as a straw man in this argument.

Part of me wonders whether or not the distaste that some “traditional” Brits “traditionally” have for possession-based football might be tied in to the fact that England is one of the few leagues in the world to have any real money or emotional investment attached to its non-top flight teams. Whereas in Spain and Germany the lower leagues are glorified reserve leagues for the major teams and in Italy it’s a distillation-of-a-country’s-psyche into a never-ending mishmash of teams being bought over by corrupted businessmen, teams imploding as a result of financial mismanagement, and teams reforming after financial mismanagement, the Championship, L1, L2 and even some non-league teams have sizeable followings. And as one of those fools who regularly turns up to watch those games part of me understands that lower league football is a game of scissors/paper/stone in which the stone will smash both the scissors and the paper every time. So when so many people have brutal punting and big-man fetishisation as their only way to ever experience The Game surely some of that will eventually trickle up to the national psyche?

before i start i should admit that i’m an espanyol supporter. but i don’t think my opinion would change that much if i supported another side.

i think the major problem with fc barcelona is that, in a sense, they are actually killing competition. the dogged determination with which they are pursuing cesc is emblematic of this – he is absolutely unnecessary to the club. they have two of the best players in the world already playing his position, they have mascherano, keita, busquets, and afellay all capable of playing in midfield, and they probably have hundreds of little soon-to-be-xavis in their academy. why do they need to purchase cesc? and what does purchasing him mean for the rest of the spanish league? in terms of his importance to the playing squad of fc barcelona, cesc is the football equivalent of a chrome-plated range rover.

barcelona (and madrid’s resultant keeping-up-with-the-jones’ spending) have turned what was the most competitive of the big leagues at the start of the 2000s into a warmer, higher quality version of the scottish league. add to that their hijacking of catalan identity, as if the entire culture of a region can be concentrated into a sports entity, and you are left with a rotten brew, indeed.

they’ve managed to earn a pass from most of the english-speaking media because, let’s face it, most british (and dutch, and german) people love going down to barcelona on holiday, visiting the camp nou museum, buying the latest shirt, and getting hammered off cheap beer. they say they like watching barcelona because they love the way the team plays, but if they REALLY cared about aesthetically-pleasing football they would most likely not support whatever team it is that they do in the UK.

that, in my mind, all adds up to barcelona actually being italicised worse – far from being morally superior, they are morally bankrupt. it’s that quote from lawrence of arabia – “one who tells lies hides the truth, but when telling half-truths you’ve forgotten where you put it.”

I don’t understand the belief that Birmingham is a Stoke-like team. Directness is Plan A for Stoke, and they got rid of Tuncay (one of their few technically gifted players, as he demonstrated against Man Utd earlier this season) in the winter transfer. On the other hand, Zigic has started only about half of Birmingham’s games, and the team now counts Hleb, Larsson, and Bentley among its players. While their midfield typically includes Lee Bowyer, it also has some combo of the aforementioned players, plus Ferguson and Gardner, which often gives them no fewer enforcers than Arsenal or Barcelona. And, from what I’ve seen, Birmingham has as much or more technical ability than similarly-placed teams in other top flight leagues. (They’ve scored about the same amount of goals per game as the 14th placed teams in Italy (Bologna), Spain (Deportivo) and Germany (Bremen).) Yes, their strikers have been woeful this year, but awful forwards don’t make a team direct in their style. And lumping the ball forward doesn’t automatically make a team ugly – no one would describe Tottenham as a “brawn over beauty” team, even on nights when their game plan is as heavily dependent on crosses to Crouch as it was against Milan yesterday.

About the only way by which Birmingham are “brutishly direct,” in fact, is by comparison with Barcelona, and that’s exactly the sort of snobbish attitude that annoys a lot of non-Barca supporters. Are Barcelona brilliant to watch? Absolutely. (I enjoy tiki taka so much that I didn’t find Spain’s World Cup run boring.) Are they the best team in the world? Most likely, if not certainly. But isn’t it possible that we can enjoy Barcelona without labeling the Birminghams and the Bolognas and the Bremens of the world “ugly,” or, even worse, “like Stoke?” Not every team’s perfect, but there’s no need to sweepingly dismiss those that aren’t.

You can’t call that mid/low table, ball hoofing, tactic legitimate by any means. That’s called having no other choice because your players aren’t capable of keeping possession. Hipsters will do what they always have done. It’s actually quite annoying to see the UK turn into the Brooklyn, NY of football.

Sometimes you need a big dumb Hollywood movie with no plot but plenty of mindless action (Stoke).
Sometimes you need an exquisitely crafted film that develops narrative through the characters involved (Barcelona).

They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but only one is going to win awards at the end of the year.

It’s a reaction to the media’s portrayal of football as being a dichotomy of the Barca style and the Stoke style. Football is more than that, and neither Barca nor Stoke invented their style, although Barca fans do act as if they had themselves (the fans inventing a style, yes, they act like that.)

Ronay is missing a point. It’s not that people brand tika-taka as better, but they brand it as “football” and anything other than that is “not-football” or “Anti-football.” In terms of religion, these people would be called fanatics even in comparison to most fanatics. Imagine a faith, let’s say a branch of Christianity for the sake of argument, in which the followers seriously believed that not only is there one true religion and every other religion is stupid and false, but also believed that every person who followed another religion, including Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, people that worship inanimate objects and Pastafarians are all the anti-Christ themselves.

That’s what it means to say “anti-football.” “Better football” is a phrase rarely used. It’s just “football” and “anti-football.”

It’s as if there’s only one style of playing football and everyone else is doing it all wrong.

You’re missing the point as well because it seems like you’re buying into the whole dichotomy argument. Being technically gifted and not playing long-balls does not mean that Joe Cole is a Barca-type player. People admire(d) Cole for his dribbling, his ability to go through defenses and for his touch, not for being a part of a team that passes the ball from the goalkeeper to the net on the other side.

In England, speed is king and that’s why it’s easier for many teams to choose to play fast and rough or use long balls, than pass it quickly, pass it through or dribble.

And flashy, technical ability is more admired than skillful, non-flashy passing and that’s why people prefer to watch players like Le Tissier and Ronaldinho (still) rather than Xavi. But apparently, Le Tissier was doing it all wrong.

@Dom Just wanted to point out that there are only two ‘B’ (reserve) teams of teams in the first division in spain playing in what is essentially their second division. It is true that B teams are allowed to play competitively in the lower leagues, but not that they are made up entirely of B sides.

@Brian Phillips I’m not sure if it’s about who is worse. Ronay obviously paints Barca as worse, but he’s not exactly complimentary of the accepted British system in his other two articles. He’s a British writer for a British publication and he knows his audience, so he will pick his spots with his criticisms. But when you look at all three as the big picture, I think he’s taking two separate examples (fans POV and institutional POV) and painting a picture of how all football is good, proper football. In the Barca article he is derogatory toward the fans (and those at Barcelona) who continually spout that they are playing true soccer, the way it is meant to be played. He points out that Brum vs. Stoke is a proper, acceptable style and there is beauty in the athleticism, strength and pace of the game. In the other two, he condemns the English system for trying to make every player a slave to that very same style, while stifling those who could flourish in their own way.

I’m sure he doesn’t have an over-arching agenda but it seems to me like his general message is that football is football, no matter where or how it is played. That, and a player should be given the license to become the player he was destined to become, rather than shoehorned into roles that don’t fit him just because his own instincts have no use in a different ideal.

I like Ronay. If only because he’s not Richard Williams or Paul Hayward. But then I’m also drunk, so what do I know?

That said, I do recall, from a time before drink was taken, issues with the second article referenced – in which the Stoke/Barca style are compared and Charlie Hughes is references. Namely, just how unconvinced by his own argument Ronay sounded. This was an article that started off with a muscular (hah) defence of the long-ball and ended with the admission that, actually, Barca are the future. The ‘ideological foundations’ of traditional English football are mentioned and then swiftly dismantled (albeit not as viciously as Jonathan Wilson is apt to). Does a man who calls for the next English football manual to be authored by Johan Cruyff (a foreigner!) really displaying a disdain for the “tippy-tappy style of play”? I suspect that Ronay himself is unsure

As I say, what do I know? Except that Arsenal-Barca was a fantastic spectacle of football and that a world in which Stoke strive to play possession one-touch football will be better for everyone. Except Nikola Zigic

i think Phillips killed (i.e. dominated, ended, assassinated) the philosophical aspect of the discussion. it was a straw man all along. the comments added and added to it, and honestly i got a little tired. mostly i just felt like reading about Arsenal-Barcelona. as the game played out, it offered a really interesting look at the stylistic context created by the fans and media. both teams are considered “pass-and-move” units, but Arsenal’s superior athleticism and speed through the team won the day.

‘For Ronay, Barcelona are corporate bullies whose actions are far more insidious than those of the amoral billionaires at Manchester City and Chelsea, because they wrap themselves in UNICEF and tell the world they are “more than a club.” ‘

I think this is an incredibly unfair statement, where do you surmise this from?

Barney Ronay is arguing for the possibility of pluralism in football, he is responding to a perceived over-saturation of adulation for Barcelona not having a go at them per se, or arguing for Stoke-Birmingham style tactics (of which he is far more humourously dismissive). I think this unfair, although I am Barney Ronay’s biggest fan.

The recent vitriol directed towards Barcelona is proof of Einstein’s notion of spacetime – as the size of a club, (by which I mean the number of fans worldwide, its trophy cabinet, its collection of world-class players, and its ego) gets bigger, its gravitational pull gets stronger, and more material is stolen away from other systems. Residents of these systems begin to hate the embiggening club until it eventually implodes, or at least cools down. See United, Manchester; Madrid, Real; and Pool, Liver.

“Then there is Barcelona’s cultural imperialism, a more subtle form of consumer home invasion than a shirt‑flogging friendly in China, whereby Barcelona instead style themselves as an elite product: the kind of brand adopted by people who feel they are above adopting brands. Barcelona are an iPod team, a vintage Japanese denim team; something undeniably good but also somehow tarnished by an accumulation of gloating approval.”

Nonetheless, I think Ronay definitely views Barca’s “velvet gloved imperialism” as something far more, as I said, insidious than other clubs’ actions precisely because they are always already branded the good guys, i.e. no one feels like they can ever question their motives.

Why is it better? I’ll tell you why, its quite simply because if you lived in the UK you would see lumps lumping a ball often from centre back to centre forward in the hope of the big striker knocking it down. Often the defender is under no presser yet still lumps it. Its utterly useless against continental teams, who then proceed to get the ball on the deck and pass holes in our sides. The gap has only been closed by filling teams with foreigners to improve the technical qualities of the sides.

This still happens though at every level. Try watching Stoke – Fulham. It quickly descends into a long ball, no-risk farce that has all the qualities of a wrestling match minus tables and chairs. And if I wanted wrestling i’d go bloody watch it!

What I find most objectionable about Barney’s sentiments in that extract, it that he is assuming he knows the reasons and motives why each individual chooses to support a certain team, and that these motives are somewhat cheapened. Thus supporting Barcelona is indicative of being a fad-technology collectionista and being conceited and (whisper it) lacking in character and ‘earthliness’.

For example, I have met many Manchester United fans who were boorish. Am I now to class all Man Utd fans as boors? Should I claim that boorishness is a prequisite for being a Man Utd supporter. Should I assume that Manchester United the club itself is either inducing or prosletysing boorishness among a potential captive fan base?

There are millions of reasons why football supporters around the globe follow the team they do, and this is their prerogative.

I enjoy Barney Ronay’s writings, his dark satirical wit and his sheer inventiveness with the language. I also respect his right to like or dislike Barcelona’s style of football to the nth degree.

What I find objectionable about article, however, is the way he resorts to a gross misrepresentation – the “televisual” libel which is so wide of the mark (and sailing dangerously close to a glass home) that is in fact more an apt description for the kind of football Stoke (Barney’s stated example) play and which has made the Premier League so lucrative today.

Surely those who are bored by tiki-taka. and find that it tests their patience, are in effect appealling to a more urgent, horizontal and instantly-gratifying style of football. In his book, Gianluca Vialla quotes Arsene Wenger mentioning how, in his opinion, the English need for speed (and the fans’ appreaciation thereof) is perhaps attributable to an inhospitable climate in which the rain and cold wind test the spectators’ and the players’ patience. You move to get warm. Get it over and done with.

I can watch a lower-table Premier League clash in which I perceive poor technique and erratic discipline to be display and yet I find myself bearing it, liking it a little perhaps. Why? Because the sheer speed, intensity and verticality of the play disguises and distracts from the poor and therefore overremunerated quality demonstrated by the players.
Slow this particular game down and I don’t think many people would be as forgiving of the overall quality – in fact, this is precisely why I find some lower-league games in Spain or Italy so tedious; there is no place for the reduced technical quality to hide.

And to address the issue of snobbery, I guess that I as a Barcelona fan am guilty by association, I am tarnished by Barney’s drive-by withering libel! But I wish he would appreciate that there is an element of inverted snobbery about his championing of Stoke and Birmingham; again, I am assuming he references these two teams as shorthand for stereotypes of old-fashioned English football. Is this an older, purer form of football? Because certainly back in Nat Lofthouse’s day, there was an unmistakeable air of moral superiority in the way that British football pervceived its game , and the belief that those deviant forms practised by foreigners were lacking in virility and honesty – oh, and they didn’t know how to shoot – was widespread.

So who are the embodiment of reactionary Puritanism? The velcro-touch adulators or the Muscular Christianity.

This is without mentioning the bizarre (in my view) obsession within British football as to the sanctity of working-class culture and the notion that Barcelona is a sad indictment of how far football has strayed from its rootsy values. Such a view overlooks the fact that working-class culture varies greatly across different countries and continents, and for working-class people of a particular society, kick and rush football was never the style of the game of their impoverished forefathers first became enamoured. Johan Cruyff and his Ajax teammates were overwhelmingly working-class, but the Calvinist residue of their societal upbringing assured that anti-intellectualism (of the kind that England’s middle-classes seem to vicariously revel in and prescribe as a fixed station of expecatations for the proles) was seen as counterproductive, boorish and undesireable.
But admist such talk of social class, and all the attendant stereotypes, we would be failing in our duty to recognise that, though one may consider oneself working-class on account of upbringing or ancestry, in the context of globalalized world the real inheritors of working-class status are the families of those West African and South American boys who dedicate their lives to the child securing a career in European football, and who much like the fathers of Nat Lofthouse, Dixie Dean et al, cannot afford to stop menail work lest they suffer malnutrition. We can avail of a Welfare State whilst watching football in a stadium or on TV – they cannot.

Believe it or not, afficionados of traditional British football fare are not alone in their inability to warm to the Barcelona and Spain sides. Many Argentine traditionalists also find it unappealling – not becasue of a lack of technique – but rather because of the high-pressing game and the high speed of ball circulation that Spain and Barcelona employ. These traditionalists prefer a slower, less intensive and more gradualist game with more gaps between midfield, defence and attack, and with more individual duels, less coordinated pressure on the ball or the man, and more space to play in.

Now, by the same token this love of slow football hardly sounds like a ringing endorsement of Premier League football, does it?

Ronay is just writing to The Guardian‘s now-rather-dogeared WATFA brief,[1] and enjoyable though he may be to read, his role is ultimately to be Andy Gray with a bigger vocabulary.[2] In strict accordance with ISO-certified WATFA procedures, as soon as anything – be it FC Barcelona, decent coffee, the Kindle or The Wire – breaks out of its only-for-us-cool-cat-cognoscenti niche and begins to be cited in terms of having reset the corresponding bar, not only are its flaws, real or imagined, gleefully raked over, but its admirers are mocked and scorned too, preferably by force-fitting as many references as possible to skinny lattes, lowercase-i prefixes and black turtlenecks.[3]

Qualifying for the sneer-and-smear treatment isn’t hard. In fact, only two boxes need to be checked. Provided it’s (a) very well done indeed and (b) very popular, then it’s instant grist to the killjoys’ miserable mill.

The practice is inverted snobbery in its purest expression – lauding the lumpen to the detriment of the class act – and it’s been going on for years and years. It began in the late Seventies with a certain clique of New Musical Express writers (several of whom went on to be associated with The Modern Review.) The victim of WATFA’s first fatwa was probably Paul McCartney (“You wouldn’t catch The Fall singing sentimental tosh about frogs”), only to be joined a bit later on by Steven Spielberg (“You wouldn’t catch Guy Ritchie shooting sentimental tosh about aliens on bicycles”) and many, many others. Show them a shiny icon and they’ll clast it.

Now it’s apparently Barcelona’s turn – and they should probably feel honoured.
______

1. “What’s All The Fuss About?”
2. “Let’s see them do it on an inhospitable, inclement Tuesday night at Stoke” is how Ronay would probably have put it.
3. Cf. the recent phenomenon of snoodophobia, for what is a snood if not an offcut from an XXL turtleneck?

Before the Bosman ruling, top level European soccer clubs reflected the country/city they were based in. English clubs played in an ‘English’ way: high paced, physical, rough, sometimes a bit mindless. Italian clubs played in an ‘Italian’ way: highly organized, solid defending, but sometimes dirty with tactical fouls, theatrics, killing a game, whatever it took to win. Dutch teams played in a ‘Dutch’ way: possession based, passing, but sometimes naive and ineffective. I could go on, every major city had its own culture and style, with their strengths and weaknesses. Today all major teams play the same way. Italian defending, Dutch passing, Latin theatrics, English pace and German professionalism. This is why club football today bores me, but I still get excited about international football. Another way in which I am the very opposite of a fan of Arsenal or Barcelona.

“I got more joy from seeing Gennaro Gattuso going ballistic the previous night than any amount of watching Barcelona pass incisively”… “This is why you see so many blokes in Barcelona shirts. They think that by wearing it, they are saying something about themselves that they appreciate ‘good’ football, not that brutal, aggressive, brutish game that the common folk love”… “shut up all those self-regarding purists who witter on about Barcelona’s perfection”….

@Archie_V The best thing about that John Nicholson F365 piece is that he wrote a column for EPL Talk defending himself from what he imagined the response would be before the piece had even been published. I thought only Barça fans were supposed to be that sensitive.

I wonder how many people who purport to know what “Barça fans” think or say have actually spent much time around people who have supported the club all their lives. I live in Barcelona and, obviously, I’m surrounded by Barça fans, none of whom have ever struck me as sanctimonious, arrogant or holier-than-thou. Like football fans everywhere, they’re just proud of their team and proud of the football the team plays, with none of the supposed vitriol towards other, more physical teams. Pretty much all their vitriol is saved up and poured on to Real Madrid, their traditional arch-enemies!

Sadly, I think Barça has been (or was) co-opted by precisely the kind of hipster portrayed so well in the blog post, the equivalent of that one kid in every class who, instead of supporting one or other of the local teams, decides to mark himself out as coolly different and support an exotic foreign team. Then there are those who become vocal supporters of whichever club happens to be winning everything at a given point in time. The crucial thing about these two examples is that they’re almost an entirely foreign phenomenon; by which I mean that the hoo-hah and the posturing and the sanctimoniousness and arrogance will be perpetrated by foreign fans and the foreign media (this latter needs to be qualified a little, taking into account the hysterical nature of the Spanish football dailies in comparison to their far more measured counterparts in the sports sections of the regular daily newspapers). Eventually, this fashionable fandom reaches a critical mass and the Barça-loving hipsters are forced, as the blog so excellently pointed out, to become the turncoats their contrarianism demands and attack Barça while singing the praises of some unlikely team such as, indeed, Stoke or Birmingham.

Meanwhile, the old men and the young ultras in Barcelona just go about their business, supporting and cheering on the team they always supported, praising Messi and complaining about Maxwell, hoping that Barça will win things this season but, above all, hoping that Real Madrid won’t.

Let me first preface this by saying I rarely preface things, however I have been described as deeply cynical.
I’m from Sydney, and am a Sydney FC fan – not a fan of Sydney FC though, an important distinction. Sydney FC are a team that plays terrible, abject, flat, sluggish, dull football. And I support them.
We’re a demented hybrid of European football; Italian histrionics, English brutishness, French determination, Germanic inventiveness, Dutch pragmatism, and the slow build-up of Spanish football, without the incision.
It just doesn’t go anywhere, it’s truly a marvel.
But you’ve got to follow your home team. You’ve just got to.

I am a fan of Arsenal and Barcelona. Forget everything, forget words, forget colours, forget places and people. Just watch the football on the pitch. How do you not enjoy that? How is the way they play football not an aesthetically pleasurable experience? I watched them play, they showed me a football that was simply amazing, and so I decided to like them. Should football fandom ever be any more than that?

The way that Stoke-type teams play simply does not lead to success at the highest levels. It’s atavistic. It’s a Neanderthal. Brutal, powerful, stout. Sure the Neanderthal might thump a Sapiens with a club every so often, but Sapiens are winning the trophies. Whenever you praise a move on the football field, think about which end of the spectrum that move is closest to. Barcenal or Stokingham.

@Archie_V
“Terrible article”.
I’m sure he’d love to see Arsenal beat them “using their skill, their pace, some direct running and some physicality”. I bet he’d prefer to see Bolton beat them using “their skill, their pace, some direct running and some physicality”, but then Bolton aren’t in the Champions League.

It’s funny, whenever you take Barcelona out of the equation, certain pundits will praise a team for any qualities they possess that are similar to them, or else say that’s what they are missing to be successful. But directly using Barcelona as a reference point brings them out in a cold sweat.

@Salman Thaw It’s my belief that when people talk of “anti-football” in relation to opponents of barca, it’s when said opponents resort to kicking at the players and fouling to stop them from being able to play their football, not out of disdain for “kick and rush” type of football. But all must agree and see that Barca have developed a certain style and it has become stamped into their identity. I was surprised when watching the CL final of 08/09 against MU that Valdes was punting the ball out of his end mostof the time, rather than playing it out as they do now. The fact that it seems to be working quite well in getting them goals and wins seems to make the claim that it is a good or “better” way legitimate. I’m a barca fan and follow a few barca blogs and while the fans are certainly proud of their team and happy to be winning I don’t see anything more than typical fan behavior, which is to say I think every fan would think of their team as the best. Plus, look at Guardiola who always expresses respect for his opponents and sees every game as a challenge no matter who the opponent is.

@VengaEspuelas I’m glad you mentioned it. It is definitely a foreign element, both the hipster and the glory-hunter and Barca attracts both. If you were to see these hipster, glory-hunting Barca-fans, you’d be so disappointed to the point of disowning Barca and hope for other teams to win, just to get to the Barca fans. Yes, it is that bad.

Sounds like Ronay doles out typical Anglo-centric crap and sour grapes; he’s fine with technique so long as it is an Englishmen who possesses it. He’d be fine with tiki-taka too if it was invented in Britain.

There’s a place for the Stoke type of play as well, that is for teams without the requisite skill to play a passing, possession type game. The more skillful players a team has, the more its style of play gravitates towards looking after possession.

Let me quote Arrigo Sacchi at this point: “Great teams have had one thing in common throughout history, regardless of
era or tactics. They owned the pitch and they owned the ball. That means
when you have the ball, you dictate play and when you are defending, you
control the space”